Digital transformation in tourism sector: trends and future perspectives from a bibliometric-content analysis

Abstract

PurposeThis article analyzes research on digital transformation in the tourism sector, providing insights into leading work, authors, journals, trends and future research opportunities. However, limited in-depth research exists on this topic, and the existing studies lack an understanding of its development, scope and relevant areas.Design/methodology/approachThe study utilized the Scopus database to identify 61 articles on digital transformation in the tourism sector. The research employed VOSviewer software to analyze publication and citation structure, incorporating bibliometric variables like co-authorship, co-citation network, keywords co-occurrence network and bibliographic coupling.FindingsThe study yielded valuable insights from top-cited articles, revealing their contributions to digital transformation in tourism research. It also highlighted publication trends and the impact of authors, journals and studies and conducted co-occurrence, co-authorship and bibliographic analyses to identify key trends and issues in the tourism sector. The study calls for further examination of the digital revolution in tourism research and outlines future opportunities for researchers in this area.Research limitations/implicationsTo enhance the comprehensiveness of data collection, it is recommended that researchers consider including publications from databases such as WOS (Web of Science), Dimensions and PubMed in addition to the Scopus database. This broader inclusion of sources can provide different network structures and valuable insights from the field of digital transformation in the tourism sector.Originality/valueThe research provides substantial value to the study of digital transformation in tourism by focusing on bibliometric data from the Scopus database for the period from 2017 to 2022. By analyzing this data, it identifies significant trends in digital transformation within tourism research. Additionally, the study uncovers new areas of digitization in the tourism sector, further enhancing its value and relevance.

Guest editorial: Marketing via smart technologies in hospitality and tourism

“…This paper provides empirical evidence by employing big data mining and analysis for hoteliers to understand what guests perceive as green practices and how they perceive them. Kumar et al (2024) study the evolution of research on digital transformation in the tourism sector and classify the research based on publication, author, journal and country productivity. The research employed VOSviewer software to analyze the structure of publications and citations of 61 articles, incorporating bibliometric variables like coauthorship, co-citation network, keywords co-occurrence network and bibliographic coupling.…”

“…Kumar et al . (2024) study the evolution of research on digital transformation in the tourism sector and classify the research based on publication, author, journal and country productivity.…”

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